It’s time again for “FLEX OR FLOP??” And this week’s company in the spotlight is… SONIC.

Yeah. Sticking with slushies may be stupid (how's that for alliteration?). That’s about the only thing I can think of with Sonic – their frozen beverages. Is that a good thing or bad? You tell me.

But before we discuss Sonic, let’s talk about my learnings from this week’s guest episode with Jaime Jay.

Jaime runs his business, Bottleneck Distant Assistants, in a fascinating way – he’s never met a single member of his oversees team. Everyone is remote. He was doing remote business before it was cool.

His team is spread out through Haiti, the Philippines, among other countries. The average age of his staff is 22! And better yet, he has his young staff members run meetings equally important as his more experienced team members. Yes, he has 19-year-olds running meetings.

Jaime shares tactics for:

• Creating psychologically safe teams (SUPER important for Gen Z)
• Engaging team members in such a way they can be offered HIGHER pay somewhere else, and still choose to stay
• Helping entrepreneurs embrace the gig economy and leverage Distant Assistants

I had a number of learnings from this episode that are applicable to companies of any size. You don’t want to miss his wisdom. And if you haven’t checked out his episode (or his book Quit Repeating Yourself), you’ll definitely want to do so.

Flex of Flop: SONIC Edition!

Sonic confuses me. They’re kind of “Floxing” – they aren’t doing great with Gen Z but I haven’t thrown the towel in on them yet.

On paper, they should be a highly attractive brand for nostalgic Gen Z’rs, but they’re having trouble finding staff, and they’ve jumped on the bandwagon of social media too late. Their competitors are outpacing them on all accounts, yet their revenues spiked significantly during COVID due to the drive-in experience.

On the episode:

• I test out features of Sonic’s career website! And discover, well, it’s trying to be something, but it’s in a very rough place.
• We learn from Sonic’s mistake in getting so far BEHIND the competition that they fail to keep up!
• I show you how to make small career website tweaks to improve your resonance with Gen Z.

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